Few people would have blamed the Deftones if the group’s new CD, “Diamond Eyes,” had been a dark and depressing album. The fact is, much of the past decade has not been kind to the group.

First there was the ordeal that was the making of the group’s 2006 CD, “Saturday Night Wrist,” a project that began more than three years earlier and saw tensions in the band reach a point where the group nearly fractured.

Then in November 2008, bassist Chi Cheng was left in a coma from injuries suffered in an auto accident. He has survived the accident, but his recovery has been slow.

“He’s out of his coma, but he’s still in a semi-conscious state, which means he wakes up and he sleeps, like a pattern that he opens his eyes and things like that. But he has yet to really communicate yet,” Deftones singer Chino Moreno reported in a recent phone interview. “We’ve got some really great doctors that are working on him, and we’ve kind of tried some experimental therapies as far as trying to get him to fully wake up and communicate. The doctor actually that’s working on him now has an 85 percent success rate.”

What’s more, a CD the band had nearly finished before Cheng’s accident – called “Eros” – was shelved and the band instead started from scratch on the recently released “Diamond Eyes.”

But despite the many tough times, “Diamond Eyes” doesn’t sound like the work of a dispirited band. In fact, it’s very much the opposite. The band sounds energized — perhaps even reborn — and the lyrical direction of the new CD is decidedly positive. And Moreno said that mood was not an accident, nor was it unintended.

“I think it was expected from everybody that we were just going to go with this dark record, with this sad record and this kind of pity kind of record, where at this point, I feel like although this happened to us, there are so many worse things (to go through),” the vocalist said. “It’s like I felt kind of empowered to show that life is going to go on, and Chi is going to fight and we’re just going to make some badass music.”

Given the turmoil that marked “Saturday Night Wrist” and the loss of Cheng, there was plenty of speculation that the Deftones would simply pack it in as a band.

But Moreno said there were never any sentiments voiced within the band (the other members are drummer Abe Cunningham, guitarist Stephen Carpenter and keyboardist Frank Delgado) for ending the Deftones, either in the immediate aftermath of Cheng’s accident or when the group met a few months later to see where things stood.

“We sat around and talked about Chi for a good couple of hours, but not really about what we planned on doing as a band,” Moreno said. “It’s like we sat there and talked, and everybody got a lot of things off of their chests, their thoughts and what we were thinking about Chi. And when we were done with that, everybody just gravitated toward their instruments and picked them up and we started to play together. And that was, I think, the most therapeutic thing at the time for us to do. There was no really talking needed. We started playing, and I guess that day we called (long-time friend) Sergio Vega to see if he could come out (and play bass). He came out the next day and that was it. We started writing music that day, and everybody seemed to be in a really creative headspace, so we just went with it.”

In fact, it took only several months to finish “Diamond Eyes,” and Moreno feels the Deftones recaptured the energy and attitude that existed in the band in its early years, when the band (which formed in 1988 in Los Angeles) made its early albums “Adrenaline” (1995) and “Around The Fur” (1997).

The group’s enthusiasm for the new material is carrying into its live shows this summer.

“The set has been pretty heavy on the new stuff, which is pretty rare for us,” Moreno said. “We’re playing about seven songs right now off of the record…We wrote this record pretty much live, had it all worked out and played these songs numerous times before we even went into the studio to record it. . . I think we’re playing them really well live.”